Is It Legal Yet? Photos Show Farming Pot Is Pretty Much Like Farming Anything Else

Many people see pot up close, but few have seen the elusive (and illegal) places where it comes from. That may soon change with the marijuana legalization bills passed last week in Colorado and Washington, but for now, pot farms remain necessarily secretive.

That’s why the photo project Grassland by H. Lee (a pseudonym) is a small, and timely, coup. Lee spent an entire year, from harvest season 2010 to harvest season 2011, documenting some of the farms that are abundant in the woods around California’s Humboldt, Mendocino and Sonoma counties.

“Honestly the photos could be from anywhere in a 500-mile radius,” says Lee, who is not only cautious about using her own name but also very careful about not revealing too many details of the places she photographed.

The photos themselves show sleepy farms that look like any other small crop producers, but are notable for the relatively rare access required to make them. Growers don’t tend to allow themselves or their operations to be photographed in large-circulation photos. No faces or personal details are visible, but Lee says she tried to be as honest as possible about what it felt like to be there around the growers.

“What I tried to do was capture the dark and the light,” she says. “It can be a dark place; people have guns. It’s not scary but it is a very cautious community.”

Lee, who claims she is not a grower and was even critical of marijuana earlier in her life, says it took about a decade to get access for her project. At first she wasn’t visiting the farms as a photographer, but eventually realized that she needed to document the area that she says “blew my mind open” about the well-known drug.

“I had my own personal transformation with the whole industry,” she says about her time on the farms. “I learned about the plant and learned about medical qualities and about pharmaceutical companies and I made a 360-degree turn.”

Far from the enormous pot farms police rappel into from helicopters and torch with fire, Lee spent time in areas where pot farming was the norm. She says whole communities where she photographed were involved in cultivation because they found a kind of power and solace in numbers.

“Farmers felt safer that their neighbors were doing what they were doing,” she says. “They were in a little bubble.”

This bubble, and a growing acceptance of marijuana (18.1 million people reported using the drug in 2011), allowed farmers to grow their plants outside with little cover. The community included the expected hippies still left around from the ’60s, she says, but there were also former dot-com-ers, more contemporary back-to-the-landers and people from a wide variety of backgrounds. They were all united, says Lee, by either a love of weed, farming, money or all three.

The group’s reaction to Proposition 19, which aimed to legalize marijuana in California during the project, was mixed. While many were obviously in favor of the measure, others were opposed because they feared their small-scale operations would be overrun by big-time growers.

“They thought the legislation would ruin them,” she says. “Who’s to say that R.J. Reynolds or some other big tobacco company wouldn’t come in and buy all these farms?”

Aside from the guns and paranoia, these small-run growers differ from the stereotype of a criminal drug operation. Whether it’s the nature of the plant, the legal gray areas of medical use in California or the seeming momentum towards legalization, an outsized amount of drama and excitement is injected into an otherwise normal offshoot of agriculture.

“Ultimately these farmers are just like you and me. They’re regular people,” says Lee.

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